A data center is a facility that houses computer systems and various networking, storage, and other related components. Data centers may, for example, provide computing services to businesses and individuals as a remote computing service or to provide “software as a service” (e.g., cloud computing). To facilitate the utilization of data center resources, virtualization technologies may allow a single physical computing machine to host one or more instances of virtual machines that appear and operate as independent computer machines to a connected computer user. With virtualization, the single physical computing device can create, maintain, or delete virtual machines in a dynamic manner.
Some virtualization technologies are capable of providing virtual resources that span two or more physical resources, such as a single virtual machine with multiple virtual processors that span multiple distinct physical computing systems. As another example, virtualization technologies may allow data storage hardware to be shared among multiple users by providing each user with a virtualized data store that may be distributed across multiple data storage devices, with each such virtualized data store acting as a distinct logical data store that provides users with the illusion that they are the sole operators and administrators of the data storage resource.
In many environments, operators of data centers that implement different types of virtualized computing, storage, and/or other network-accessible resources may allow customers to reserve or purchase access to resources in various resource acquisition modes. The computing resource provider may provide facilities for customers to select and launch the desired computing resources, deploy application components to the computing resources, and maintain an application executing in the environment. The computing resources provided by the computing resource provider may be made available in discrete units, which may be referred to as instances. An instance may represent a physical server hardware platform, a virtual machine instance executing on a server, or some combination of the two. Various types and configurations of instances may be made available, including different sizes of resources executing different operating systems (OS) and/or hypervisors and with various installed software applications, runtimes, and the like.
A service provider, such as an entity that operates a provider network, may offer computing resources, such as computing instances and storage resources, to customers (customers may also be referred to as entities or users). A customer may be any person or entity who accesses computing resources of a service provider and has a predefined relationship with the service provider. The service provider may, for example, provide a web services platform. Multiple customers may access a web services platform via a computing node and issue instructions to the web services platform. A web services platform may be called a multi-tenant web services platform to denote that multiple customers may access the platform. In turn, the web services platform may respond to these instructions by performing computing operations on one or more of a plurality of computing nodes that make up the web services platform. The web services platform may remotely store files for a customer that that customer may later access. Other types of resources may be offered by the provider network.